Strawberry Creek Lab/Field Trip

Objective: To compare habitat quality near headwaters with locations lower in the watershed. To investigate potential impacts of restoration attempts on UC Berkeley Campus and Strawberry Creek Park.

Early in the year we discussed the River Continuum Concept – you can find lots of info on this online if your notes are sketchy. You can use this idea as a basis for your discussion of the changes that we saw comparing the top of Strawberry Creek to lower areas. Many of the changes we noticed would be expected of any creek, regardless of where it’s located, but in the case of the urban creeks in the east bay, things are complicated by pollution runoff (street run-off, pesticides, sewage), channelization and other bank modifications, introduced species in the riparian zone, or destruction of the riparian zone, increased sedimentation, and thinks like “steps” that would prevent fish from moving upstream. Strawberry Creek has been impacted by humans for hundreds of years, and restoration efforts have been ongoing for the last couple of decades. A helpful thing to think about is what natural ecosystem processes are most integral in maintaining a healthy stream.

Introduction:

Your introduction should discuss all of this; remember the basic idea in the intro of a scientific paper is to start general and get more specific. If there is one aspect of the work we did that you thought was particularly interesting, you can focus in it as you work through your intro. You could alternatively look at habitat quality more holistically, and discuss how all of the different things we looked at combine to influence diversity and ecosystem services. You could also focus on the restoration aspect – what processes are most important to restore in urban streams? What is the history of restoration on SC, etc.

I’d like you to have at least three references cited in the intro.

Methods:

For the methods section, be as specific as you can about where we went and who did what. You obviously know exactly what YOU did, but you should talk to other groups to make sure you are clear about what they did. You don’t need to go into great detail about specific methods – for example you don’t need to talk about exactly how much of each reagent was used in the nitrate tests, etc, but you should refer to the manual that the water chemistry group used.

The things we did that should be included:

Habitat Assessment Index (Ursula, Michelle, Karina)

Macroinvertebrate sampling (Abby, Rachel, Ian, Scout)

Water Chemistry: nitrates (turbidity didn’t work) (Julia, Nathan, Jager)

Water Chemistry: alkalinity, hardness, total dissolved solids (Alex and Jack)

Leaf samples and “stream walk” – Lauren and Justine

Jonna did phosphates back at school

Sam, Josh, Alan were absent (you guys will have to interview the groups above!)

Results:

The data collected are in an EXCEL file on the website. We obviously didn’t collect enough data for statistical analyses. You should augment the data in the table with your observations.

Discussion:

Start specific, get more general. The content of your discussion will depend on how you slanted your introduction, but should discuss possible explanations for our results and suggest additional work that would be interesting or valuable, either on SC or other east bay urban creeks. Again, I’d like to see at least three refs cited in your Discussion.

Be sure you have a Reference Cited page.

Some useful links about Strawberry Creek and other local urban creeks:

http://www.museumca.org/creeks/wb-A1-RescEast.html

http://www.cemar.org/pdf/alameda.pdf (trout and salmon in east bay creeks)

http://www.museumca.org/creeks/1140-RescStrawberry.html

http://www.epa.gov/owow/monitoring/volunteer/stream/

http://www.fivecreeks.org/